Lady Liberty let down her hair first thing after setting down torch and book. her crown she cradled for a moment, then let fall without a second look. she slipped from her robe and, skyclad and sun-kissed, she dove into the sea and swam for hours—out past the breakers, then back to the bay. helicopters hovered overhead; she splashed up at them playfully with sheets of salty spray.
she floated serenely on her back, hair haloed in the waves, long and lustrous black. copper-colored islands rose and fell as breath moved in her chest, the water dark in channels run between her knees and thighs and breasts. her eyes, light brown and laughing, were cloud-turned, mild and warm.
when the word had time to get around, the people came to port; the ferries swarmed. nearly nine in ten men (and one in ten women) fell hard enough on sight to swear an oath—to her, to what she stands for, to beauty and bo[u]ndlessness both. (some of them even kept it when she’d gone off on her way; the rest came near to weeping when they thought back to that day.)
sea-washed, she climbed to her pedestal perch, wrung her hair to dry. she lounged there, sunsetbathing, as the star slid down the sky. in twilight she paged through her book and read aloud; a straining silence shuddered through the shore’s teeming crowds. there were other poems in it than the famous Lazarine ode: ballads to the borderlands, paeans to the open road.
it should have been a hint she wasn’t long to stay. there was some debate: “off to seek a lover,” some would later say in boards and barrooms. (for she is indeed brazen, and even when silent the curve of her lips spoke volumes.) others thought it more likely she was off to ancient lands—to visit petite soeur, perhaps—and after that? well, who could guess? they shook their heads, threw up their hands.
but when that night fell on her form, these thoughts were far from every mind. at first they shone a spotlight; when she waved it away they relented, as much relieved as resigned. in the dark she danced, her torch in beckoning hand, bewitching her believers with a gaze that stretched from sea to street, from city center out to seaside sand. they got the message, all right. come, my people, that look said, let’s turn out all the lights.
with nod, and a wave, and a wink of her eye, she lifted the lid of her lamp held high, releasing its imprisoned lightning back into the sky, and all across the city every single spark of light went out.
it didn’t take them long to fix; generators whirred, and circuits switched, redundancies designed to guard against the dark and its companion, doubt. and though they searched with their lights as the night wore on, only a few were truly surprised to find the mighty woman gone. they never saw her again, but that moment marked them all: whether gridlocked in their stalled-out cars or caged by lessymbolic bars, none who lived it ever forgot the night every soul in the city saw stars.